How to Eat Well on Day One in a New City

Skip the Michelin guide on day one. The food you remember is almost never at the place you booked three weeks in advance.

The mistake people make on day one in a new city, including, until recently, me, is to plan dinner. You arrive at the hotel jet-lagged at 3 p.m., shower, walk around the immediate neighborhood for an hour, and then sit down at the restaurant you booked from your kitchen in California three weeks ago. The food is fine. The room is fine. It is not the meal you remember from the trip.

The meal you remember from the trip is almost always the one you stumbled into. Day one is the day to set yourself up to stumble into it. Here is how I think about that, after enough trips that I have stopped booking dinner on day one entirely.

The day-one rule

Eat lunch like a local. Eat dinner like a person who just got off a plane.

By which I mean: lunch on day one is when your appetite is most reliably aligned with the local eating clock (most cities eat lunch between noon and 2 p.m., regardless of jet lag). Dinner on day one is when your body thinks it is the wrong time and you are not going to enjoy a three-course tasting menu anyway. So: invest the meal-planning effort in lunch, and let dinner be casual.

This is the opposite of how most travel writing tells you to do it. Travel writing tells you to book the dinner reservation. Travel writing is wrong on day one specifically.

Where to eat lunch

I look for one of three things in the immediate neighborhood of the hotel:

The local lunch counter that is full at noon. Every city has these. They serve one or two things, the line is full of people in work clothes, and the menu is usually some variation on a sandwich, a daily special, and coffee. The signs are: a line, no tourists, and the people behind the counter look mildly stressed. You will pay $8 to $14 for a meal that will be the best food you have on the trip.

The bar / cafe at lunch service. In most European and South American cities, the corner bar serves a casual midday meal that the regulars eat. Italian bars do tramezzini and a piatto del giorno. Spanish bars do menú del día. French cafes do plat du jour. These are working-person meals, priced for working people, and they are reliably good because they are fed by a cycle of returning customers, not Google reviews.

The market. Every city with a real food culture has a covered market or a permanent stall area, with prepared-food counters tucked between the produce. Santa Caterina in Barcelona, Mercato Centrale in Florence, Rungis in Paris (suburb), Time Out Market in Lisbon (yes, even though it is touristy, the smaller stalls are real). Markets at lunch hour are the highest density of good food per dollar in any city, and you can sample three things instead of committing to one meal.

The key is that none of these require a reservation, and none of them are "the right place." They are several right places, and you can walk in and out of any of them without ceremony.

How to find them, fast

Three tactics, in order of how reliable they are:

1. Ask the hotel front desk staff where they eat lunch on a workday. Not where they recommend (they will recommend a tourist trap because they have been told to), but where they actually eat. The phrasing matters: "Where do you go for lunch on a regular workday?" gets you a different answer than "Where should I eat?"

2. Walk a 10-minute radius around the hotel between 12:30 and 1:30 p.m. Look for places with lines of locals. Do not go in if it is empty. Do not go in if it is full of tourists. The middle ground, full of locals on lunch break, is the right answer.

3. Look at restaurant Instagram accounts, not Google reviews. Google reviews get gamed in tourist cities. Instagram accounts of small restaurants tend to be honest, and you can see what is actually being plated this week. Filter by "city + cucina di mercato" or "city + comida casera" or "city + bistro de quartier" depending on the language; you will find the unsung neighborhood places.

Where to eat dinner on day one

Anywhere casual that is open until 10. Specifically:

• A wine bar with a small kitchen. Rotating small plates, no reservations, you can eat lightly and leave whenever your jet lag wins. The food is usually better than the meal at the place you would have booked.
• A bistro or trattoria that takes walk-ins. Same idea. Look for a chalkboard menu (changes daily, good sign) and at least three older couples eating (it is a real local).
• A casual pasta or pizza place near the hotel. This is the boring answer and the right one. On day one you want simple, hot, comforting, fast.
• The hotel restaurant. Heretical to say, but true: a good hotel restaurant is sometimes the best move on day one. You are upstairs from your bed. You can be in pajamas in 30 minutes. You can eat half the entree, leave the bottle of wine, and not feel bad about it. The hotel restaurant is over-engineered for exactly this scenario.

What you do not do: book the three-Michelin-star tasting menu. That meal is for day three, when you are acclimated, hungry, and capable of paying attention.

The "look up only one restaurant" rule

Before the trip, I look up one restaurant. Not three. One. The one I want to go to most. I book it for day three or four, never day one.

Then I trust the city for the rest of the trip. This is hard to do for the first few trips because there is a strong instinct to over-plan. But the over-planning is what gives you the trip-of-restaurants experience, where you spend half your time eating dinners chosen by an algorithm and the other half eating breakfasts at the hotel. Pick one anchor meal, leave the rest open, and let the city deliver.

A few small things

• Cash for the markets. Even in card-heavy countries, the small market stalls are cash-friendlier and faster.
• An empty stomach, not a full one. Do not eat the airport meal on the way in. Be hungry when you land.
• Eat at the bar, not the table. Faster service, sometimes a different smaller menu, often the locals' choice. Same food, half the time.
• Skip breakfast on day one. Walk past the hotel buffet. Have a coffee at a corner cafe. Save your appetite for lunch. Most hotel breakfasts in Europe are a sad facsimile of what you can get walking out the door.
• Try not to take a photo of every plate. I know. But it changes the meal.

The bottom line

Day one is about getting the food rhythm right, not about booking the right meal. Lunch is the meal that matters; dinner is the meal that does not. Walk a ten-minute radius of the hotel between 12:30 and 1:30, look for the lunch counter or the corner bar, and eat what the regulars are eating. Save the booked-three-weeks-in-advance restaurant for day three.

The meal you will remember from the trip is almost certainly not on day one. Setting up day one for casual, easy eating is what makes day three's anchor meal good.